Professional Learning Program

Planning, implementing and evaluating the Reading to Learn strategies require high level skills in both classroom teaching and text analysis. The teaching strategies involve detailed planning of classroom interactions, to ensure that all students are able to participate actively at the same high level. Planning these lessons requires linguistic knowledge to select appropriate texts, and to analyse their language patterns.

These skills are developed through eight days of training workshops, with supported classroom practice and evaluation between workshops. In each cycle of workshops and classroom practice, teachers build up their skills in teaching reading and writing, and their knowledge about language. Each cycle also involves planning lessons within teachers’ curriculum programs, and assessing students’ growth. Workshop content includes:

Workshop 1

Assessing baseline writing

Selecting and analysing texts across the curriculum

Planning reading lessons

Links to syllabus and quality teaching

Modelling writing

Workshop 2

Detailed reading and rewriting strategies

Techniques for factual and story texts

Planning detailed reading lessons

Workshop 3

Intensive strategies

Language patterns in sentences

Scaffolding maths lessons

Writing assessment

Workshop 4

Language patterns in texts

Technique for persuasive texts

Final writing assessment

Supporting the workshops and teaching practice is a set of ten course books, that teachers work through during and between workshops, and a training DVD of demonstration lessons with early years, primary and secondary classes.

These course books and DVDs can be ordered directly from this website here

Workshops typically involve teachers of junior and upper primary years and all secondary subject areas. This allows cross-fertilisation of ideas and practices, both across grades and across schools. Within workshops there is a balance between whole group activities, and dividing into grade and subject groups for practicing lesson planning.

Books

Genre Relations: Mapping Culture

This book provides an introduction to genre analysis from the perspective of the ‘Sydney School’ of functional linguistics.

Chapter 1 introduces our general orientation to genre from the perspective of system and structure, and places genre within our general model of language and social context. Chapters 2-5 deal with five major families of genres (stories, histories, reports, explanations and procedures), introducing a range of descriptive tools and theoretical developments along the way. Finally in Chapter 6 we deal with a range of issues arising for genre analysis in a model of this kind.

The book has been written for a readership of functional linguists, discourse analysts and educational linguists, including their post-graduate and advanced undergraduate students.